Alwaght-Hundreds of America-led airstrikes and daily multi-million dollar military operations have failed to stem the tide of foreign terrorists entering Iraq and Syria, who continue to pour in by their thousands, according to multiple reports.
“The flow of fighters making their way to Syria remains constant, so the overall number continues to rise,” an American intelligence official told the Washington Post.
Concrete changes might not be apparent for weeks the official said, noting the natural lag between the actual situations on the ground versus the scenario painted by analyzed intelligence.
With America's intelligence estimating that 1,000 foreign terrorists continue to enter Iraq and Syria every month, the Post estimates that their numbers now exceed 16,000. That figure eclipses the number of foreign terrorists who took up arms in any analogous conflict over the past decades, including the Soviet military campaign in Afghanistan.
The figures fall within the same ballpark of a recent UN Security Council estimate. According to documents seen by The Guardian, 15,000 people have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside ISIS terrorists and similar extremist groups. They come from more than 80 countries, the report states, “including a tail of countries that have not previously faced challenges relating to Al-Qaeda.”
The figures mirror America's intelligence estimates in September, which also reckoned some 15,000 mercenary terrorists had entered the region via 80 different countries.
Reflecting the Post’s assessment, the UN committee notes that overall numbers since 2010 “are now many times the size of the cumulative numbers of foreign terrorist fighters between 1990 and 2010 – and are growing.”
The committee, tasked with monitoring Al-Qaeda, did not mention the 80 states by name, though the overall geographical diversity of terrorists was unprecedented.
Meanwhile, the reports sharply underscore how expensive America-led military efforts have so far proved ineffective at stemming the tide of the IS advance in Syria and Iraq.
America and its allies have carried out more than 600 strikes so far in Syria and Iraq, with the strategic aim of allowing opposition and terrorist forces some breathing space to regroup. Since August 8, the America has flown 6,600 manned and unmanned sorties in Iraq and Syria at an estimated cost of $8.3 million a day, Defense News reports. Last week, it was reported that 32 civilians have died so far in the strikes.
Earlier this month, the Associated Press, citing Pentagon data, estimated that the United States alone had spent approximately $1.1 billion on its military operations in Iraq and Syria since mid-June.
Pentagon spokesperson Rear Admiral John Kirby said this week that the bombing campaign was disrupting ISIS terrorist group, though he admitted that any major offensive “may still be a ways off,” the Post cites him as saying.
American officials have said that the uninterrupted flow of terrorist is not a proper metric to measure the effectiveness of the airstrikes, which have killed an estimated 460 ISIS terrorists since last month, on top of 60 more terrorists from the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jabhat al-Nusra.
Officials have attributed the number and pace of the mercenary terrorists arriving in the region to several factors, including sophisticated ISIS terrorist group recruiting techniques and the relative ease with which would-be jihadists can travel from the greater Middle East and Europe to Syria and Iraq.
The UN report similarly recognized "the terror and recruitment value of multichannel, multi-language social and other media messaging," being conducted by ISIS terrorist group.
A recent CNN/ORC International survey found that 54 percent of respondents believe the strikes will degrade and destroy the military capability of ISIS terrorist group. That figure is down from 61 percent in September.
Meanwhile, the number of respondents who support sending American ground troops to engage the jihadists was 45 percent - a seven percent jump over the previous month. A majority, however, still oppose putting boots on the ground. It seems that American media have tried to instill the necessity of putting boots on the grounds of Iraq and Syria into the mind of nations. They have tried to illustrate the ineffectiveness of airstrikes in Iraq and Syria. The propaganda being published by western and mid-east Media try to form a new American scenario for occupying Iraq and Syria and toppling down their democratic governments.
Source: Russia Today
